Cooperator selection in 2.4ghz on-body wireless body area network

Abstract

The WBAN on-body multi-link radio channels at 2.4 GHz were investigated. A wearable channel sounding system using commercial off-the-shelf Zigbee radios capable of continuous, prolonged and synchronized measurement has been developed. The measured channels were statistically analyzed to identify the potential cooperator nodes for two hop relaying in a star topology WBAN. This will be useful in designing relaying and cooperative communication schemes for improving the reliability of a WBAN under various channel fading conditions. Significant performance gain for two hop link, with the selected cooperator node, over the direct link in terms of outage rate is demonstrated.